Fields of Interest: Greek and Roman History; Ancient Religion; Classical Tradition

A native of Brooklyn, Ronald Mellor made daily expeditions to Manhattan to study Latin and Greek at Regis High School. He later studied classics and philosophy (in French) at the University of Louvain (Belgium) and Fordham University (A.B. 1962). He received his doctorate in Classics at Princeton in 1968.

Mellor first taught in the Classics department at Stanford University including six months at Stanford’s campus in Florence. Since 1976, he has taught Greek and Roman History in the History department at UCLA. His courses include Western Civilization and World History, as well as a month-long Travel Study course he taught for ten summers in Rome for the UCLA Summer Session. He has led multiple UCLA Alumni Study tours in Italy, France, Germany, Greece, Slovenia, and Turkey. He served for two years (1983-1985) as Director of the UC Education Abroad Program for the United Kingdom and Ireland supervising 130 students at 15 English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish universities.

He has been a Visiting Fellow/Scholar at University College London (1969-70; 1972-73; 1983-85; 1991), the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University (1990), the American Academy in Rome (1987; 1991-1992; 2001; 2010; 2014; 2018), Boalt Law School (UCB) (1975-1976), and the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies (1997-1998). He has also held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Ronald Mellor has given dozens of scholarly papers at professional conferences as well as invited lectures in universities and museums across the United States, Europe, Israel and Australia. He has also appeared in more than two dozen videos (NBC; PBS; History Channel; A & E; Discovery Channel), and spoke as an invited lecturer on Princess Cruises to Alaska, Cape Horn, and Norway. He was a Phi Beta Kappa Distinguished Lecturer at seven colleges in 2010-2011.

From 1992 to 1997 Mellor was Chair of the UCLA History Department – at that time the largest History Department in America. He served in 1997-2005 as the statewide Principal Investigator of the California History-Social Science Project, which brings university faculty together with K-12 teachers at multiple sites in California. The CHSSP was given the 2000 American Historical Association Beveridge Award for K-12 teaching. As part of the CHSSP, Mellor has been co-Director of the UCLA History Geography project from 1992 until 2020.

Mellor’s research has centered on ancient religion and Roman historiography with more than ten scholarly books and numerous articles. His books include: THEA ROME: The Goddess Roma in the Greek World (1975); “The Goddess Roma” (1981); From Augustus to Nero: The First Dynasty of Imperial Rome (1989); Tacitus (1993); Tacitus: The Classical Heritage (1995); The Roman Historians (Routledge, 1999); The Historians of Ancient Rome (1997; 2004; 2013); Text and Tradition: Studies in Honor of Mortimer Chambers (1999, ed. with L. Tritle); Augustus and the Creation of the Roman Empire (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005); and The Annals of Tacitus, (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Mellor was the co-general editor (with Amanda Podany) of The World in Ancient Times – a series of nine volumes on ancient world history for young readers published by the Oxford University Press. For that series, Mellor is co-author of The Ancient Roman World (OUP, 2004) and The World in Ancient Times: Primary Sources and Reference Volume (OUP, 2005).

In 2013 Mellor retired from full time teaching as Distinguished Research Professor of History. On his retirement the Arcadia Foundation, based in the U.K., donated $5 million to UCLA to establish “The Ronald Mellor Professorship in Ancient History.” Among his extensive service to UCLA, Mellor served at President of the UCLA Faculty Center (2009-2010) and as President of the Emeriti Association (2018-2019).